Amanda Holden has railed against the confinement of big cats at zoos by getting locked into a small cage in central London to demonstrate the restrictive living conditions.
The TV star was among a number of famous faces – including presenter Kirsty Gallagher and actress Jenny Seagrove – who were “held captive” in cages in London’s Leicester Square.
The protest was organised by wildlife charity Born Free in a bid to highlight how some animals such as lions, tigers and cheetahs are in “inadequate living spaces, unnatural social groupings, and distressing proximity to prey animals” in zoos across the UK and Europe.
Speaking about the confinement of big cats, Holden told the PA news agency: “I still can’t believe in this day and age, with the empathy that we have and the causes that we have, that we’re still seeing caged big cats. It’s nuts.”
She added: “I’m all about conservation, so that’s very important, but I think seeing zoos still containing beautiful wild creatures that should be running free needs to stop.
“I understand that there’s an educational side, that people learn from observing these beautiful creatures, but… their captivity is not a good thing to be teaching or educating our children.
“There’s a million other ways that we can study animals.”
She encouraged others who felt passionately about the issue to speak to their local zoos and to educate their children about animals living the wild.
After being held in the cage, she said it “doesn’t feel great” as she is used to be being able to do what she wants as a “free woman”.
The cages containing the celebrities were fitted with zoo-style signage which gave information about the human species and a “Did You Know?” facts section.
The protest comes alongside the release of a new report by the charity which claims that more than 3,000 big cats being held in zoos across Europe and the UK face a “myriad of issues”.
It also compares how small the average enclosures are for different big cats in comparison to their natural range in the wild.
Co-founder and trustee of Born Free Dame Virginia McKenna said: “It is distressing to see the conditions of big cats living in captivity, where these creatures are restricted to spaces many orders of magnitude smaller than those in which they have evolved to roam.
“In our new report, we are challenging the global zoo industry to phase-out big cat captivity and cease breeding animals destined for a life in an enclosure. We hope the public will join us.”
As part of its campaign, the charity is calling on the Government to implement key recommendations including “stopping breeding programmes, ending the import of big cats from other countries, banning visitor interactions, the introduction of mandatory enclosure size regulations and separating big cats from prey species”.
